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Monument to the Filmless Future; In New Digital Arts Center, Hollywood Acknowledges Change

By RICK LYMAN

Published: March 1, 2001

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 28—
Robert Zemeckis made his way through the labyrinth of scaffolding and packing crates, steering clear of the ''Wet Paint'' signs and excusing himself as he passed through throngs of workers making the final touches on the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at the University of Southern California. Outside, a tent was rising over the parking lot for the opening gala on Thursday evening.

''When I was at U.S.C. in the 1970's, I remember a couple of students talking about 'audio,' and a professor heard them and said, 'Men' -- and it was all men back then -- 'you are in film school, and in film we talk about picture and track. There is no video, and there is no audio,''' Mr. Zemeckis said.

Mr. Zemeckis, director of films like ''Cast Away'' and ''Forrest Gump,'' laughed and pushed through the door into a classroom for beginning film students filled with 30 Avid film-editing machines. A few young faces peered up tentatively from their work.

''Now, I've noticed the new word you hear students use is capture,'' he said. ''You don't shoot a scene, you capture it. It's not principal photography, it's the initial capture. That's because with digital technology there is so much that you can do with the image after you shoot it. The whole notion that what was photographed in the camera is the final image is gone forever.''

Hollywood is not famous for its agility in adapting to change, though when cornered by innovations like sound and color it has always eventually, if reluctantly, embraced them. One of the main forces pushing digital technology is that it is much cheaper to use. The equipment is less costly and requires less elaborate lighting, and there are no costs of developing film or striking prints. Most everyone in the entertainment industry now is well aware that developing digital technologies will profoundly affect and permanently alter not only the way movies are made, but also the kinds of movies that get made.

That is why the grand opening of the new Zemeckis Center, in a former warehouse just north of the U.S.C. campus in South-Central Los Angeles, is as good an occasion as any to ask how the rapidly evolving digital world will influence new filmmakers, many of whom grew up with home video cameras and have never worked with film in their lives.

''I really like that this is not some brick-and-ivy building,'' Mr. Zemeckis said of the 35,000-square-foot center, for which he acts as head cheerleader and chief benefactor, having gotten the ball rolling in 1998 with a $5 million contribution. ''It looks like the kind of places that these students will actually work at when they graduate.''

Digital filmmaking has been for the past five years or so largely the domain of shoestring rebels like Lars von Trier and Mike Figgis, or of high-end computer effects houses like Digital Domain and Industrial Light and Magic, while mainstream studios have generally gone along making films as they have for decades.

What is most immediately noticeable about the Zemeckis Center is the list of those who have chosen to be associated with it, beginning with Mr. Zemeckis, one of the most successful mainstream directors in Hollywood, and continuing through filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (who contributed money to build adjoining digital stages; Mr. Spielberg named his for the late Stanley Kubrick, Mr. Lucas for Akira Kurosawa) and television figures like NBC's Scott Sassa and the writer-producer John Wells.

Four major studios -- Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures -- have donated money or equipment and have portions of the center named for them. Two major talent agencies, the Creative Artists Agency and the William Morris Agency, are also in evidence.

This is the Hollywood establishment planting its stake right in the middle of the emerging digital world.

''What we are going through, with this shift to digital, is on the same level and just as significant as the change from silent to sound films, or the shift from black-and-white to color,'' Mr. Lucas said this week.

He, more than most directors, has embraced the new technology. Indeed, his ''Star Wars: Episode 2'' will be the first major studio film shot entirely with new generation digital cameras. In many theaters, when it is released in the summer of 2002, a digital projection system will be used so that at no point in the movie's cycle of production and exhibition will film -- that shiny strip of celluloid clacking along sprockets in a flickering projector -- have played any role.

''Each one of these changes, whether it's from silent to sound or from film to digital, has really changed the vocabulary that the filmmaker has to work with,'' Mr. Lucas said. ''What happens with digital is that it makes the medium much more malleable. You can do things that you just could not do before.''

A digital camera uses no film, capturing its images on digital tape or some form of computer disk. Since film editing and special effects have pretty much been digital for the last decade, it is possible to feed the camera's digital images directly into the editing machine, blending them with computer-generated digital effects and creating a final, digital version of the movie.